Michelle Hartline, Assistant to Doug Schepp

Nicholas Harris

said
8 months ago

If this message appeared while you were on the internet, it is not a virus and is simply an advertisement designed to scare you into calling the number listed on the screen so that they can steal your money. This is not a virus and is not a threat to your computer; it is simply an annoying advertisement.

Similarly, these tech support scams may start as an unsolicited phone call telling you that you have a virus. No legitimate company, including VIPRE, will ever call you unsolicited about your computer.

VIPRE is not designed to block advertisement and will only block legitimate threats to your computer (much like how a locked front door will block intruders to your home but will not stop people from putting flyers on your door).

Additional information about these types of advertisements can be found at the United States of America’s Federal Trade Commission website (linked below).

If you let these people, listed on the advertisement, into your computer and are concerned about what they may have done while in the computer, we would recommend running a full scan with the VIPRE program to ensure that there are no viruses on the machine. Additionally, we would recommend contacting a qualified local computer technician or Microsoft for further assistance in ensuring that those who accessed your machine did not make any unauthorized changes to your computer.

To close the message, follow these steps:

1. Press and hold CTRL+ALT+DELETE and click on the Task Manager option.

2. For all of the processes that have anything to do with browsers (Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc...), you will need to right click on the browser name and then left click on "End Task"

Microsoft Edge users must also do the following:

A. On the keyboard, hold down the WINDOWS + R keys in order to bring up your 'Run' box and type www.google.com and then click 'ok'.

B. Here, you need to 'x' out of (close) all of the tabs that do not belong to Google.

3. The advertisement has now been closed. The next time you open the browser, your browser may prompt you to restore a previous session. DO NOT RESTORE THE PREVIOUS SESSION. If you do, you will reopen the advertisement.